What is a sword without the man behind it? Teaching a swordsman to kill is simple. The true challenge lies in teaching him not to kill.

When I watched my young brother Yasuo begin training, he breathed life into the blade at first touch. One heard whispers in the halls comparing him to the sword masters of old. But as he grew and his skills increased, so did his ego. He was impetuous and boastful; he ignored our master’s lessons and knew nothing of patience.

Fearing my brother had strayed too far from the way, I went not to warn him, but to make an appeal to his honor. I gave him a maple seed, our school’s highest lesson in humilityâ€¦one Yasuo seemed to have forgotten. A seed is just a seed, but given time one may come to know the beauty it holds within. Yasuo took my gift, and the following day he accepted a modest guard post. I had high hopes he would learn the patience and virtue required of a true swordsman.

It was not to be.

Today, Yasuo committed an act of treason by murdering the very person he was sworn to protect. He has betrayed his nation, his friends, and himself.Â Were it not for my actions, I wonder if he would have been swept down this dark path.Â But my task is not to question; I must bear the burden of my duty.Â At first light tomorrow, I set out to capture a sword without a sheath: my brother Yasuo.

Recently, a lot of discussion has kicked up about some recent item name changes that went out late last weekend. Specifically, a lot of people were concerned about the name changes to Shureliaâ€™s Reverie, Philosopherâ€™s Stone and Philosopherâ€™s Pebble.

We really do care about how attached you guys are to the game, its items and the development team that got League this far.

Let me see if I clearly understand your concerns:

Concerns about the removal of Shureliaâ€™s name and respecting her legacy

Unclear why the changes to the item names occurred

The new theme was inferred, but not clearly understood

Sad about the removal of the Harry Potter reference to the Philosopherâ€™s Stone, (as well as the Medieval reference IRL)

Difficulty finding the new item in the shop

Is this correct? Please let me know if not.

Why do this?

Next, letâ€™s talk about the changes and why. RiotRadioblur will be talking about the artistic direction, while I talk about the mechanics, theme and overall direction.

When I approached the task of adjusting the gold income streams for Season 4, I initially did my best to keep the old item names and themes. This was great â€“ people jumping into the game easily figured out the relationships between the old items and the new ones. [e.g. Pebble -> Stone] However, some of them just didnâ€™t make sense (Philosopherâ€™s Stone -> Shureliaâ€™s Reverie). My initial reaction was to accept that these kinds of strange things will happen when you change items and leave it alone.

Playtesting and feedback

Then we brought in a large group of players from a wide variety of skills and backgrounds to play the content for next season. These players would consistently give us the feedback: â€œOh, why doesnâ€™t Philosopherâ€™s Stone still build into Y? You guys should just make new items, since they are completely independent build path.â€ After hearing this enough times, we decided it was the right call to go back and revisit the items and their icons.

About the same time, we decided it was the right call to make the gold income items exclusive (Madlife and H4ck3rv2 destroyed internal playtests by smartly stacking and optimizing the items). Combining these two concepts lead us in a clear direction:

Make each unique income stream item themed to a different faction.

Naturally, our first choice was to go through a long process of evaluating which factions were the best for each of the concepts. Leona and Pantheon are great representations of the dangerous, headlong risk-taking playstyle we wanted to encourage, so the ancient relic shield of Targon became the clear choice. Shard of True Iceâ€™s new active was a perfect fit for a Freljord item. Finally, we came down to the passive gold generation item.

Initially, we kept the Philosopherâ€™s Idea, but as we looked at the goals of picking an item name which matched the goals of:

Fit the mechanics

Fit into the story of league of legends

Be a clear story and path as the item evolves with you

We realized that telling the story of a Philosopherâ€™s Stone was very subtle, hard to convey and harder to fit into the story of league. So we decided to explore a direction that helps expand upon the realm of Shurima. Recently, as weâ€™ve gone back and worked on Nasus, Sivir and Xerath, weâ€™ve realized the world of Shurima is far less well-understood than the other major regions of League of Legends. There are potentially a lot of awesome stories can tell here, but we havenâ€™t done a great job of getting there.

So we wanted to help integrate the contribution of the fallen Shurima Empire into league better. Sunfire Cape (an awesome item on both Nasus and Renekton) has been rethemed to carry the logo of the fallen empire. Similarly, we thought the story of an ancient coin that turns out to be a part of an ancient religious icon was also a cool way at gently introducing lore with the preseason.

About Shurelia

At no point did we intend or want to change this item to exclude or forget about Shurelia. However, when you see a name go out without the new icon and art, itâ€™s easy to feel like it was made for some reason like that. However, while we love Shurelia, we do not want to imply that Shurelia is the sun god of Runeterra. (Besides, if you knew Shurelia, you know she much, much more preferred the Darkness. Clever girl.)

So, since we are taking that away, how do we intend to remember her legacy? Hereâ€™s what we propose: (New Icons weren’t ready when I made the screenshots, but RadioBlur will be posting them shortly!)

(Note: I didnâ€™t get the new icons when I made these screenshots, and the exact quotes are subject to change)

The new items will be keeping their new names

We add a new character who discovered these items â€“ Historian Shurelya

Weâ€™ll rename â€œIcon of the Sun Diskâ€ to â€œShurima’s Reverieâ€

Weâ€™ll make add â€˜Shurelyaâ€™ shows up when you search for the item in the search box of the item shop

We want to ensure that our new items are clear, easy to understand and recognize all of the contributions made to get them into the game.

Tell us your thoughts.
-Xelnath

Update

Â Xelnath:Â After much discussion, considering the points in this thread, alongside the costs and benefits of our changes, we’re going forward with the item replacements, fully aware of your concerns.

We want to do the best to make the build paths make sense, show a clear progression and be cohesive. When the identity of an item changes, we need to be aware, communicate and adapt it to suit the our game in the long-run.

There is a group of players who are convinced this was done for malicious reasons. This is simply not true – feel free to engage with Shurelia on her Twitter.

There are other players who are upset that there isn’t more explanation or lore of the world and don’t feel there’s enough explanation of the universe to understand the context of these changes.

Finally, there are players who would prefer change not occur. Thank you, we recognize your pain, and recognize that you will continue to call the item Shurelya’s, even with a new set of stats, icon and build path. For you guys, we will be including the subname Shurelya’s in the search box, as well as keeping flavor text on the items, pending adjustments by the creative team.

Thank you for discussing all of this.

Item Name Progression

Â RiotRadioblur:Â Hello again!

As Xelnath has stated, thereâ€™s a lot of purpose that went into the change, and I feel heâ€™s really captured the essence of what weâ€™re trying to accomplish. Many of the points the community has made about the decision have been totally valid, but there are definitely some that could use more context before being set in stone. My hope is that I can provide that context to explain how these new objects fit intoÂ League, and how they serve to enhance both gameplay and the continued development of our world. So letâ€™s take a look at the art, shall we?

The original Philosopherâ€™s Stone is pretty mediocre, in that it is basically a rock with a swirl on it. It looks pretty bland, and the fidelity is super low. When we talked about reworking the icon originally before Preseason changes were even in our minds, we talked about what kind of people we would expect to have a Philosopherâ€™s Stone, and the closest we could come in our minds was Zaun. The problem here is that the fit just isnâ€™t clean enough. Zaun is into nasty chemistry, and the Philosopherâ€™s Stone is some sort of magical item alchemists could use to change lead into gold. Itâ€™s not visceral or gross enough to be Zaun, who are by far a lot more practical and scientific in their approach than alchemy is. Still, we made an icon originally for this theme. The icon itself has good quality art by our measure, but the thematic sell just wasnâ€™t coming through. The storytelling isn’t strong enough.

We might find a home for this item later, but I doubt it will make it in without some substantial tweaks and re-theming to make it really work with the world weâ€™re building.

So as Xelnath was saying, Philosopherâ€™s Stone saw some interesting shifts in the way it was built that ended up being confusing for players who expected the item to build the way it used to. In thinking how to resolve this, we toyed with various idea (including running with Philosopherâ€™s Stone and finding a way to make it fit), but the best path we eventually decided was to make something new. We sat down with some writers and tried to suss out a cohesive story for these items and how they fit into our world. We noticed a few themes in Shurima were working really strong for this item.

The first step becomes a coin. We drew references from Chinese coins, which have a hole in the middle allowing them to be fitted on strings for carrying around. This gives a sense of showing off oneâ€™s wealth outwardly, as a string of coins could really push the opulence weâ€™re striving for here. The long shape weâ€™ve chosen is to highlight the radial motif, and the flares mimic many of the shapes seen in our Shuriman championsâ€™ armor. The result is something simple, but unique. It really feels like it belongs in our world now, something we can tangibly expect to see our characters showing off.

The next step is an emblem. Nomadâ€™s Medallion does not currently have art, but we are looking again to themes of gold and trade for this design. It will likely feature a subtle sun motif and will have some hint of the desert from which it comes. A good luck charm for merchants, it should reference and reinforce Shuriman cultural motifs.

Lastly comes a symbol with power. An icon, not in the sense of simply being representative, but in the sense of being of an almost religious importance. Something a person of great dedication to the sun might wear to invoke the favor of the kind of higher beings Shurima is home toâ€”Nasus, Renekton, etc. But an icon carries so many connotations now, the phrase doesnâ€™t have the same meaning to most people upon reading it. This is why it makes the most sense to add the â€œReverieâ€ back into it; a celebration of the sun, not simply an image of it. Ultimately I think this will be a really good direction to take the item, both in theme and name.

I canâ€™t stress enough that we are still on good terms with Shurelya, by the way (actually, she recently emailed me to send me feedback on some other icons that are going out). This change is not meant to slight her in any way, but instead to build an item more into the storytelling of our universe. I understand the confusion, but I want to be clear that it was not part of our intentions at any point.

As for the art, I think weâ€™re going to end up with something really clear and good for gameplay here. (Gold item gives you gold? Win in my book!) The initial confusion might be strenuous, but the long term payoffs should be beneficial based on what weâ€™ve come to understand about the changes.

Looking forward to hearing what you have to say!

Cheers!

–Radioblur

Why is Shurelya’s name misspelled in the original post?

Â Xelnath:Â As I understood it: She named the original and did not want her name spelled exactly the same way, to avoid the problem where other people poached her name in other games.

(This happened to Ezreal – his name is taken everywhere!)

Why was Youmuu’s Ghostblade’s icon changed?

Â Â RiotRadioblur:Â Going into the icon, neither of us were aware it was a reference to another franchise, but I’ll be honest in saying that shouldn’t be a limiting factor in our decision to rework the icon. If we are beholden to other games’ content, how can we expect to more fully flesh out our own? I think it’s an important question we’re trying to answer right now in sorting through much of the content that needs to be reworked. In this particular case, nobody understood the reference, but I’ll be straight with you and say that I’m kind of glad nobody did. I think the result is a weapon that really feels Ionian and has a unique style it wouldn’t have had if we limited ourselves to what Touhou had done.

That said, the feedback about it not being a katana is a bit of a stretch. When it was being redesigned, we never thought to make it *not* a katana. The only thing we sought to change was to give it an Ionian styling in line with some of our champs from the region we felt embodied the emotion a “ghostblade” should have, namely drawing from Zed, Syndra, and Varus for some of that styling. The curvature of a katana is not clearly visible from a crop-in of the hilt, which is where a lot of the confusion is coming from, as well as the blade edge being only slightly off-center which people have suggested makes it look like a broadsword. The blade isn’t pushed further toward the edge for a reason, though; when it was, the in-game read was only 1.5 pixels wide making it impossible to see the highlight on the edge and totally washing out the readability of the icon.

However, we got some feedback last week about the grip being wrong, as we had totally overlooked the distinct wrapping a katana has on the grip. We also got some great feedback about the glow in the background killing the readability. I addressed these changes but they might not have been picked up on PBE yet. At any rate, you can see it below here just in case you haven’t seen it yet:

I’m not sure how set we are in protecting content that so heavily leverages from another IP going forward, and I don’t want to speak to that. But what I can say is that I feel like the new icon is a net positive change for the game in terms of story-telling, readability, and quality of art. I hope that’s worth something.Â

Urgot’s a champion we haven’t talked much about recently and one who’s fallen out of sight after we reduced his power a while back. That’s something we’d like to look at – reanimated undead monstrosity with powerful, heavy weapons and a mighty hatred’s a cool concept that we’re not doing justice at the moment.

As a result we’ll be doing some work on Urgot’s kit next year, experimenting to find out what we need to do to preserve (or enhance) the cool aspects about him, while fixing the problems that lead us to nerfing him heavily in the past. That’ll take a while, as a starting point though I thought it’d be great to get a bunch of thoughts from people on Urgot, both what he currently is and what he’s got the potential to be.

If you play Urgot, what is it that appeals to you about him, both in terms of theme and gameplay? Which of his abilities define what it’s like to play Urgot for you? If you don’t play Urgot, are there particular reasons you’re not interested in doing so?

When playing as Urgot are there things that feel unnecessarily difficult to do or ineffective? When playing against Urgot are there things that feel unfair?

General thoughts/comments also extremely welcome. One disclaimer though – at the moment at least we’re only looking to work on Urgot’s gameplay, not do a full overhaul of him, so while we’ll assummedly give Urgot a visual upgrade at some point it’ll be a separate, later project.